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Monday, 17 November 2014

This lovely brown book presents insights into 52 literary
failures: histories of unread, unpublished, unfinished and sometimes unwritten great
works, collected by C D Rose and retold with both care and wit. Every single
one made me laugh, and I don’t just mean with schadenfreude or a dry resigned
croak at the common fate of so many writers. As unlikely as it sounds, I found
this book immensely cheering. This I put down to the treatment of this delicate subject
by C D Rose, who is interviewed below.

Z: Writers often shy away
from looking closely at other failed writers, perhaps for fear of infection.
What made you dig so deep into this world? Was it one literary failure in
particular or a general fascination?

C: I should say that I have been driven to write by an
unnameable internal compulsion, a desire to translate into words that which I
have seen, felt, or thought.I should
say that I have an innate desire to tell stories, to captivate, enthral or
thrill.And yet, I have to admit that
one of the things that attracted me to being a writer was a description I once
read of a day in the life of Ian Fleming: an early rise followed by a swim in
Oracabessa Bay, a large cup of strong Blue Mountain coffee, a cigarette, a
plate of lightly scrambled eggs perhaps, then two to three hours of writing
before having a pre-lunch cocktail.Going to lunch with friends, then returning for a nap before spending
another hour or two editing that morning’s work, then dressing for dinner…This,
I thought, this would be the life for me (though, needless to say, it has never
yet happened.)But taken from a
biographical point of view – what boredom!Fleming had lived enough life to draw on to make his stories interesting,
but who would want to read endless pages describing a life like that?There are, of course, the successful
failures, Hemingway for example, or Dostoevsky, but their stories have been
well and often told.

Failure, I believed, could not infect me, as I had so far
managed to fail perfectly well all by myself, so the chance encounter with a
few unfinished, tantalising stories – perhaps inevitably – drew me in.Fearing I could fail no more myself, I would
gladly join their ranks.

There’s something somebody once said about not staring into
the abyss for too long, for fear it should stare back into you.I was happy not to stare, but to jump.

Z: Another common
characteristic of writers is a tendency for self-sabotage when success becomes
an actual possibility. How do the writers you have uncovered fit into this pattern,
if at all?

C: I don’t believe any of the writers in the book ever
consciously self-sabotaged, but there again, who does?Ellery Fortescue who spent her writing life
in bed, Stanhope Barnes who left his work on a railway station, Kevin
Stapleton, the travel writer who developed an acute case of agoraphobia, Ernst
Bellmer, who couldn’t help eating what he had written or Chad Sheehan, who has
begun many promising works, but has been unable to get past the first line, may
all seem to be indicative of this strange psychological block.

Works of art, it has been said, are never finished, only
abandoned.Perhaps it is not success
that writers fear, but completion.

Z: It strikes me that a
complete dictionary of failed writers would be an awful lot bigger than a
dictionary of all successful ones. Given the sheer number of unpublished
writers and unfinished manuscripts, indeed unwritten works, out there, how did
you decide when to stop this research?

C: It was tied to time.I had a year to tell these stories.One a week, for twelve months.I
knew fifty-two had to be the limit.There are indeed many others out there, some of whom we nod to in the
BDLF, but without a strict limit I would have gone madder than I already am.

Z: One curiously
consistent detail in many of the entries is the brand of typewriter the author
used. How were you able to ascertain this kind of information? Has it inspired
you to avoid typewriters for fear of failure?

C: Writers are superstitious creatures.We have heard of some writers who will wear
only yellow socks, others who will not change their underpants for the entire duration
of a writing project, still others who swear that if they do not spend at least
an hour drinking tea and checking their Twitter feed before starting work they will
produce nothing of worth.Typewriters,
in their (approximate) hundred year tyranny over the writer became a strange
talisman.(I, for example, have recently
had to acquire a new laptop, and have not yet written a word on it because the
keyboard is, well, just, off somehow.)

For a period, during the writing of the BDLF, I started to
collect typewriters, finding them among the many abandoned dwellings and remote
junkshops that were our research libraries, and wanting to give them a
home.Then I realised they were staring
at me threateningly, their empty barrels a complaint against the very writers
who had once loved them so.I had to
move out, and left them all in the house I, too, abandoned.

Z: Through the successful
publication of this book, the exposure you’ve given to some of the writers in
it may result in a renewed interest in their work – perhaps even some new work
or completion of work in progress. Would you then feel compelled to create a
second edition omitting the writers that had become a success since the first
publication of BDLF?

C: It would certainly be rewarding to see Otha Orkkut’s work
finally translated, or Veronica Vass’ deciphered, or to read a reprint of Lysva
Vilikhe’s Guide for the Curious Traveller. However, we feel – and not without
regret – that this is unlikely.

Z: If you could choose
how to fail (if you had not already been a success), which of the methods in
BDLF would you choose?

C: I have already tried several of the methods described, none
of which I found satisfactory.That
which remains most tempting is the route of Wilson Young, who has never stopped
travelling, and knows he cannot begin a story until his journey is complete.

Z: A certain Squattrinato
has contributed several unreliable testimonies to your dictionary. How did you
come to meet him and acquire these? Is he also a literary failure?

C: Ach, Squattrinato.I
did realise that the publication of this volume may bring him a degree of
exposure, but could not in good faith ignore his contributions (however
dubious).I don’t want to go on about
Squattrinato, as any more mentions of his name will only serve to further
inflate his already over-inflated ego.Suffice to say that I met him during my sojourn in Italy, under
circumstances best left obscure.

Z: I hope this volume
inspires other dictionaries of failure – scientific, inventive, other kinds of
artistic perhaps. What is next for you
in your research? Can we look forward to further investigations into obscurity
or are you going to risk it with some fiction of you own?

C: The best fiction often is an investigation into obscurity. A
journey into the darkness, an attempt to set the darkness
echoing. Fact? Fiction? Art or science?History or literature?True or
false?Who can say what is true and what
isn’t?Can you?

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.